OT: IE7 vs Firefox

Rich B · 2008-01-25T20:05:21+00:00

I've been using Firefox for a good while now, and I like it. A mate who knows his stuff says he much prefers IE7. I thought I would do a little comparison. I've always known that Firefox is a bit hungry for memory, and I thought that I would see which program used the most.Firefox, sitting there doing nothing but display my home page (iGoogle with a load of bookmarks, and a few links to BBC, weather, Wikipedia, etc.) is gobbling 21MB of RAM. If I open IE7 and go to the same page, it's using slghtly less - 20.6MB.So far, so comparable. However, they start to show some difference when you start opening tabs in the same window. The memory usage for 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 tabs open simultaneously (all on the same URL) is as follows:IE7 - 20.6, 30.7, 39.2, 46.7, 54.0FF - 21.0, 23.9, 26.0, 27.6, 29.9So IE7 uses fractionally less memory with one tab open, but uses an additional 8.4MB on average for each new tab you open. FF, on the other hand, asks for an average of 2.2MB per new tab. Not scientific, I know, but perhaps indicative of the two programs handling things very differently.Anyone the faintest idea why?

OT: IE7 vs Firefox

Jan 25, 2008 22 Replies

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Richard 18 years ago

Thanks Steve

At first glance it seems to expect me to be using a phone rather than a PDA - I have an elderly iPAQ Pocket PC. But I'll have a thorough look later.

Rgds

Richard

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Austin Shackles 18 years ago

On or around Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:55:26 -0000, "Rich B" enlightened us thusly:

apart from the tendency to ignore published standards in favour of their own, and your observations about memory appetite, and the known fact that as shipped, traditionally, the IE + OE combo leaves the machine wide open to viruses and the like...

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SteveG 18 years ago

I use it with my ageing Medion PPC but it won't connect to my Sony Eriksson phone - wrong processor I think.

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